


As He Lies Dying

by Lexalicious70



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: M/M, Vampires, Victorian Themes, references to Interview With a Vampire canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:07:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27110005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lexalicious70/pseuds/Lexalicious70
Summary: It's 1839 and Eliot Waugh, the best and brightest of Brakebills London, is dying of tuberculosis. Quentin has a plan to bring him back from the brink of death, but the cost may be too great for both of them.
Relationships: Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh
Comments: 8
Kudos: 21
Collections: Kinktober Horror Erotica Collection by Quentins_Quill





	As He Lies Dying

**Author's Note:**

> For Kinktober: The Queliot Edition day 19, "Gothic Victorian Boudoir."

“This is no way to meet your maker.” 

Quentin and Margo stood at their friend’s bedside as the doctor from Brakebills School of Magical Pedagogy, London, who had come to call leaned over Eliot, a stethoscope to his chest. The heavy scarlet drapes the handsome young magician hung in his spacious boudoir in happier times were drawn across the windows, the plush couch where the three of them spent time talking, laughing, and drinking wine (or sometimes absinthe) had seen no such merriment in the weeks since Eliot fell ill. 

“Truly, are there any good ways?” Quentin asked, hiding a tearful catch in his voice with a sudden clearing of his throat, which he muffled with a silk handkerchief. Eliot, the love of his young life and one of the most talented magicians at Brakebills London, was no longer the flirtatious and personable (If not sometimes aristocratic in his tastes,) Quentin had fallen for six months earlier when he’d come to London from Camden Town via one of the school’s portals for his exam. Eliot often jested Brakebills London should take stock in the new Birmingham-London railway which had opened the year before, in 1838, and send its students to school via train instead. 

But oh, Eliot . . . Quentin’s beautiful, rare lover, his balm, his lighthouse in a sea of troubles that had made Quentin Coldwater an outcast in the world outside Brakebills London. Eliot, who could banish Quentin’s frequent melancholia with a kiss or a touch, who always knew the latest parlor games and where to buy the best wine, now looked like some cruel parody of his former self, fashioned by mocking and twisted hands. The flesh of his face seemed stretched over his skull, making deep, grey hollows of the skin under his eyes. His lips, usually so full and sensual, looked thin, pale, and parched. His skin and the whites of his eyes carried a yellow tint, and he clutched a blood-spattered handkerchief in his left hand. The half-moons of his fingernails appeared livid, as if his blood had gone poisonous and filled his body with terrible fluids. 

The doctor straightened, caught Quentin’s eye, and gave a deliberate shake of his head. Margo put a hand to her mouth. 

“It may be any time now. I’m sorry,” the doctor said as he packed up his instruments and left without another word. Margo scoffed. 

“Sorry! His medical degree, that’s what’s sorry! That quack!” 

“Margo, don’t,” Quentin admonished in a quiet tone as Eliot tried to bring the bloodstained handkerchief to his mouth. He failed and coughed a fine spray of bright red blood across the ivory pillowcase. 

“Sorry,” he rasped. “So sorry . . .” 

“Shhhh, my beloved,” Quentin murmured as he wet a clean cloth in the washbasin and cleaned Eliot’s lips and chin as Margo stripped the pillow and slid on a fresh pillow cover from the linen cupboard. Eliot’s stately grandfather clock ticked away the precious minutes of his life as Quentin stroked his dark curls. They felt brittle and lifeless, the hair of a man who’d already died and could do nothing but wait for the mortuary carriage to arrive. 

“There’s nothing else for it, Margo. I’m going to do what I said I would last week. I’m going to see Armand.” 

“Quentin, you can’t! You’d be forfeiting your life!” 

“I’d rather be like Armand and make Eliot that way than live without him! Don’t you understand? Seeing Eliot into his grave will destroy me! I would follow him anyway in the space of a day, perhaps two, but no more than that!” 

“But Eliot needs to make that choice!” Margo said in a fierce, hushed tone. 

Quentin gave a curt nod as he glanced back to the shrouded canopy bed with its velvet curtains. Eliot looked very small within. 

“If he survives until I return, I shall give it to him.” 

___________________________________________________________________________

Eighteen hours passed and Eliot clung to life as if from a frayed thread on a rotting burial shroud. The silence in the boudoir became oppressive and Margo cleaned the furniture and wound the grandfather clock to pass the time. She knew Quentin might never return from his errand---Armand’s appetites sometimes overcame his geniality as a host. 

Just after sunset, during the 18th hour of his absence, Quentin returned. His dark eyes looked like two small pools of fresh tar that blazed out of a face paler than Eliot’s. His tawny hair had fresh luster and smelled like dried roses. He approached Eliot’s bed, leaned over, and whispered in his ear. Eliot’s eyes didn’t open but he made a rasping sound that might have either been a word or a death rattle. Quentin tore Eliot’s sleeping gown at the neck, kissed his lips, then gave him a different kind of kiss, sinking his new and gleaming white fangs into Eliot’s jugular. Blood spotted the ripped material in spreading blots of scarlet. After a few moments, Quentin lifted his head, bit into his own wrist, and let his blood fall onto Eliot’s lips like wet rose petals. Margo watched, both hands clutched to her breasts. Eliot’s lips moved, then parted, and Quentin fed him a few more drops. 

“Drink, beloved!” He said. “Drink and be well, drink and return to me!” 

Eliot’s body bucked in the bed and shook the canopy curtains. He gasped, struggled for air, gasped again, then went still. A moment later, his brittle dark curls grew long and glossy, a sharp contrast to the pale cheeks and cream-white forehead. The hollows around his eyes vanished and he sat up, revealing a pair of luminescent honey-colored eyes that regarded his boudoir with wonder before settling on Quentin. He smiled, revealing new fangs. 

“Quentin. My sweet, brave Q . . . my forever love,” he said, embracing Quentin and kissing him as Margo wept in a mix of relief and amazement at Quentin’s courage. 

“The cure was also a curse,” Quentin said as he touched Eliot’s face, and Eliot shook his head. 

“The true curse would have been our eternal parting--the grave shutting me away from you forever. And now . . . “ 

“And now?” Quentin smiled. 

“And now, my love, my companion, my sweet sire . . . I have a multitude of lifetimes thanks to you, where illness can never touch me again.” 

“No.” Quentin stroked Eliot’s ebony curls. “The only touch you will ever know again is this.” Quentin drew Eliot into a loving embrace as the room’s shadows grew long and the old grandfather clock, ever patient, ticked away time that no longer held either man captive with its reminder of mortality. 

THE END 


End file.
